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Remembering A Different Sarajevo

By FRANCINE PROSE;

Published: August 8, 1993

IT was a warm May evening, and we were having drinks with friends in the garden cafe of the Hotel Europa -- a dignified and slightly faded grand hotel that, with its Turkish carpets, its burnished wooden floors and overstuffed plush furniture, seemed designed for secret assignations in a spy novel by Eric Ambler or Graham Greene. Paper lanterns glowed softly in the trees of the garden, and, as the waiter brought more wine, our friends spoke of the worsening hardships of life in their city: the mounting ethnic tensions, an inflation rate so high that their salaries depreciated in the half hour it took them to cross town and exchange their dinars for hard currency. But even these problems seemed somehow less pressing as we laughed and drank wine and watched our children play soccer in the garden with other children from France, from Germany, from all over Yugoslavia.

Suddenly there was a commotion. A group of gypsy children had run into the cafe. Everyone was screaming, because one tiny gypsy girl had a broken, jagged broomstick and was tossing it like a javelin. The gypsy children ran away as quickly as they'd come, and I remember thinking, very clearly: Something's missing. What was gone was my younger son Leon's denim jacket, which he'd tossed over a chair. The kids had nimbly lifted it as they'd left. Leon's shock and sense of betrayal was enormous; he was only slightly comforted when, the next morning, we managed to find him a new denim jacket in the city market.

This happened in Sarajevo, in the spring of 1989. I had received a Fulbright Fellowship to what was then Yugoslavia, and spent that spring and early summer traveling with my husband and two sons from Slovenia to Serbia, from Croatia to Macedonia, attending poetry festivals, writers' conferences, meeting playwrights, poets and novelists. All over that beautiful country, interesting and vaguely melancholy people were extremely hospitable and eager to talk about old hatreds and new worries that the fragile truces might not last . . .

Three summers later, Sarajevo was in flames and rubble. When the horrifying dispatches began to appear on the evening news, my sons -- who were by then 10 and 14 years old and usually no more interested than most boys their age in reports from distant and mystifying war zones -- would come sit quietly beside me, wide-eyed and appalled. We'd watch together as the cameras panned the ruins of familiar places: streets we'd strolled, mosques we'd visited, the ice cream stands with their rainbows of flavors, the old Moslem quarter in which we'd eaten barbecued meat and borek, a flaky pastry filled with cheese. We saw the burned-out shell of the tram that had taken us to the spa where the Archduke Francis Ferdinand spent his last night. After the infamous massacre, we saw corpses outside the bakery we had passed nearly every day.

Sooner or later, I knew, my children would ask me what I thought had happened to the kids who had stolen Leon's jacket. And when they did, I told them the children were probably all right, gypsies were skilled at survival; they'd endured the Holocaust, centuries of prejudice and persecution . . . Perhaps they'd left Sarajevo for a safer place.

My sons looked at me and nodded. I don't know if they believed me.

Travel is said to be educational, and, like so many cliches, that one is true. Away from home, we find that life is not the same all over, that a foreign place looks foreign; in time we may learn that its people are wholly unlike, and precisely like, ourselves. Travel teaches us, like nothing else, that distant places are real, that they exist in three dimensions and not just in grainy black-and-white photos or brief bites on TV, jerky clips punctuated by bursts of mortar fire or the rattle of machine guns. It's self-evident that a place will always seem closer to us after we have been there.

Never is this proximity sharper or more painful than when that place has almost ceased to exist -- or at least to exist as we knew it. Given the growing casualty list of countries and cultures, the more we have traveled, the greater the chance that we'll pick up the morning paper and read that some city we once loved has been reduced to ashes. We could each write our own elegiac Baedeker of ruined or vanished places.

During the Soviet-Afghan War, I thought obsessively about the great mosque at Mazar-i-Sharif in northeast Afghanistan, rising out of the desert like a giant peacock-blue mirage, covered with ceramic tiles decorated with tracery and flowers. When the war neared Mazar, I remembered how, in the evenings, the people of the town strolled slowly in the gardens of the mosque; many carried tea roses that they sniffed from time to time. I kept seeing how the pink and orange roses looked against the bright blue of the mosque and the white of pure white pigeons who flocked around its domes at dusk. Nor can I forget how cheered and deeply moved I was by the wild magnificence, the unspoiled beauty of the Columbia Glacier, which we visited on a boat trip to Valdez the summer before the Exxon oil spill.

OF course, I would do anything to spare my children the slightest sorrow, and yet I want them -- and all of us -- to feel for what has happened to the Bosnian city in which we ate so much ice cream and drank such good wine, and in which a child's denim jacket was stolen by other children. I was glad when Leon, asked to contribute an editorial to his fifth grade newspaper, wrote an essay about Sarajevo. He said, "Because we were there, Sarajevo holds a special place in our hearts which won't go away."

Travel is educational -- but what is this knowledge worth, exactly? It's a question we have to ask ourselves in cases like the Afghan war, about which we could do so little, and in others like Bosnia, where it may already be too late to do anything at all. Even so, it's knowledge that I want us to have. Perhaps it's only a deeper awareness of what was once there, and of what is being lost -- an inability to forget for one day what's happening daily in Sarajevo, or to flip past the chilling evening news in search of "Entertainment Tonight."

Last month, I heard that the Hotel Europa had been gutted, first by enemy shelling and then by the hundreds of refugees who occupied the hotel when the damaged structure was converted to a refugee center. I heard this from a friend who is covering the Bosnian war, and who was told, "In the old days, someone like you would have stayed at the Hotel Europa."

When I told my sons I was writing this piece, they suggested that I mention how, when we finally left Yugoslavia, they were both so terribly sad. We left the country in the most romantic way, on an overnight ferry from Split to Venice. When the ship pulled out of Split harbor -- it was sunset -- Bruno got very quiet, and his younger brother burst into torrential tears. They had made friends in Yugoslavia, friends they hated to leave, just as we all hated leaving the place in which we'd been so happy.

My sons still remember my efforts to comfort them, how I'd put my arms around them and promised: They'd see their friends again, they'd see them soon. We'd be going back, in no time.

Drawing

FRANCINE PROSE is the author, most recently, of "The Peaceable Kingdom," a collection of short stories to be published next month by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

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